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After Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney went out of their way to insult the idea of a puffed up ignoramus like Donald Trump hosting a political debate, the perpetually thin-skinned reality TV mouthpiece went on a mini media blitz to slag each of them as unworthy of serious consideration. Now Michele Bachmann has sent her regrets. Donald is down to two – Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

“Many of my opponents jockeyed to be the first to fly up to New York and use Donald Trump for a photo op and no doubt try and secure an endorsement,” Santorum said in a statement. “But when Donald wants to moderate a debate – they refuse to attend. That’s what’s so wrong with politics today – hypocrisy.”
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“Donald Trump knows business and knows global markets – and we all know he’ll be able to bring in a broad audience. And let’s be honest, at least Donald Trump will have more in common with the candidates than with the vast majority of past moderators.”

Santorum apparently believes (among the many batshit insane convictions rattling around in his vacant skull) that anyone with some money – and how much Trump actually has is a matter of some contention – must have a wizard like understanding of business and markets. But let’s be clear: Donald Trump’s father was a New York city slum lord who left Trump large chunks of prime NY property. Anyone who couldn’t get rich in the Manhattan real estate market between 1980 and 2000 would be, by definition, too stupid to remember to breath. This doesn’t explain how Donald managed to go bankrupt twice, or how being a property developer on the eastern seaboard translates to competence in “Global markets.” Nevertheless, in his desperation for attention – any attention – Santorum is obligated to stump for one of the few places where he might still be asked a question.

As for Trump bringing in a broad audience, Santorum is telegraphing how desperate he really is to have someone pretend to listen to him. Trump’s audience demographic tunes in to watch Gary Busey get shouted at by Meatloaf. These are people who consider Trump’s penthouse – gilded and jewel-encrusted as if Liberace redecorated the Winter Palace – to be the absolute end of interior decor. If this the audience Santorum is after, he should show up to the debate in a diamond-coated Rolls Royce Silver Cloud wearing a floor-length mink.

But for Rick Santorum to accuse anyone of hypocrisy is both laughable and nauseating. This god walloping doofus denies both evolution and global warming. He asserts that America invaded Iraq in retaliation for 9/11. Santorum was out in front of the mob that castigated Anthony Wiener but ran cover for John Ensign when his affair blew up in his face. Perhaps the worst and most egregious example of Santorum’s fact-free hypocrisy: he opposes abortion in ALL cases – rape and incest included – but personally approved a late-term, partial birth abortion to save the life of his wife.
If hypocrisy is what’s wrong with politics – and calling attention to Republican hypocrisy is both the easiest job in the world and the busiest one could ever be – Santorum could go a long way to solving that problem by quitting.

The debate, assuming it even goes off, could be interesting to watch: Santorum, as a theocratic social conservative, trying to nail Newt with his adultery and multiple marriages while Trump, himself a serial adulterer and monogamist, demonstrates that being the overbearing, arrogant, stunningly ignorant blowhard that holds court on The Apprentice is the only skill he possesses.

Multiple marriages and infidelities aside, it’s going to be tough for Newt to maintain his image of being the smart candidate – the ideas man – when being questioned by Donald “I’m always right about everything – you’re fired” Trump.

But there’s something uglier and far more dysfunctional going on here. Not so long ago, Trump surged into top spot in the polls as a reconstructed birther nut without even getting in the race. Trump eventually declined to toss his toupee in the ring, opting instead to host another season of his idiotic reality TV show. Most of the candidates faithfully sneaked into and out of Trump’s office seeking his endorsement. Now they won’t go to his debate and publicly insult the very idea of him moderating such an event.
It’s as if Trump were a candidate, following the flash-in-the-pan political arc of each successive Republican front-runner: Bachmann was up, now she’s just googly-eyed historical revisionist leftovers. Perry’s flame burned bright but, like Icarus, he singed his perfect hair with stunningly clueless arrogance and a series of gaffes that make Wile E. Coyote look like a NASA mission planner. Cain exposed himself as someone too eager to expose himself. And now Trump, once managing secret investigations in Hawaii to uncover the truth about Barack Obama’s birth certificate and the darling of the desperate conservative base, can’t get the other kids to come to his party. They not only won’t attend, they’re spreading rumors that Donald has cooties and no one likes him anyway.

At what point does even the clueless, Fox News milk-fed, ignorant, racist Republican base begin to wonder what the fuck is wrong with their whole program? A cast of clowns, liars, cheats, thieves, hypocrites and incompetents all scrambling to dig the cleats into a vapid, unserious, cartoon blowhard whose ring (and ass) they were clamoring to kiss a mere few weeks ago.

I’ve written about the firebaggers, and how myopic and annoying it is that there are people on the left who seem intent on slagging President Obama for not delivering their lollipops and rainbows; who seem to want to divide and demoralize the left for all that remains to be done in achieving their ideal outcomes and utopian civilization. If the current slate of Republican candidates and their idiotic circus act of sucking up to the most degenerate, ugly, hateful, backward elements of the American electorate while advocating for a laundry list of demonstrably failed policies isn’t enough to motivate liberals to the voting booth, if for no other reason than to teach those lying fuckers the lesson they so richly deserve, they will have well and truly earned all they get from the administration of President Gingrich.